


Wilderness Tips

by annhellsing



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Awkward Romance, Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hugs, Kissing, Zombies, hand-holding, pre-Season One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22162618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annhellsing/pseuds/annhellsing
Summary: This is the one time the apocalypse made old love strong again.
Relationships: Shane Walsh/Reader, Shane Walsh/You
Kudos: 26





	Wilderness Tips

**Author's Note:**

> nobody cares about shane any more i guess but i fucking do so??? have some this!!!

He is afraid of that which resembles him, not that it’ll be readily admitted. For regardless of his strong will and survival instinct, there is only one response when faced with a thing that looks dead and is no longer. No longer dead, that is.

It is to breathe very quickly and very sharply in the hope that one’s heart does not give out. It is to shove the object of affection —both to his surprise and yours— as far out of harm’s way as one is able. And it is to stare, stupidly, when the object becomes a device.

“Shane,” you have the decency to bear a warning in your voice before you grab the sharpened knife hanging loosely at his side. And you slash, outwardly, over his shoulder.

He’s pushed, gently, aside. You stand, still-flinching with a shaking hand in front of an evil thing. You sink the blade into a rotting shoulder. Stomach. Avoiding the gaping maw and stumbling back.

“You gotta,” he starts, he’s still breathing, “it’s the brain, you gotta aim for the head.”

And you do as you’re told. For once, he thinks with a loaded spite at the back of his mind. How many arguments had he started with the way you’d fight every word he said, regardless of intent? Always, the fighting. But you slide the knife under the monster’s chin, killing it in one try.

“Oh, my holy God,” you stumble through other expletives until you feel his hand on your wrist. Warm and rough and tugging, tugging you away from the trees and the rocks where the dead like to hide.

“Hey,” he says after a few steps, because safety is a myth but affection isn’t, “just a second, lemme look at you.”

You’re not used to him talking like that. How long has it been since he offered up love? Shane can shut down with the best of them, convince himself that your best efforts are insufficient. But he holds your cheek in the cradle of his big palm. His eyes are like a retriever’s, you told him that when you used to make him laugh.

Big, brown eyes stare at you. They scan your face, then your neck and shoulders. Your arms and wrists and hands. He’s looking for pain he can heal, it’s been so long.

“I’m okay, babe,” you choke a little on the first syllable of a boring pet name. But he likes it, told you as much on the third date. Said it melted his heart. You sigh, letting go of that last, frightened lungful of air.

“They—” he starts. He looks at the corpse you made lying on its chest in the mud. It isn’t shaking or moving. You killed it. “I don’t know why, but it’s gotta be the brain. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” you tell him, “I’m okay. It’s dead.”

Again. It’s dead again.

He hugs you. Not with two arms, with his whole body. And you’re pushed back a little, crushed under the sudden return of his beating heart a ribcage away from your own. You fold around him, squeezing his middle and feeling his nose in your hair.

You rub his back for a lack of anything else to do. Intimacy and him get along easier than he’ll admit. Even when things are going south quick as lightning, he’s got a lot of love left to give. You won’t let it slip through your fingers.

“It’s all right,” you say just to fill the silence. Shane’s mouth is pressed insistently to the side of your head. You feel his muscles, coiled tight as springs under your hands. “Lori’n Carl’ll be wonderin’ if we died out here.”

He doesn’t seem to be listening. Shane is too busy embracing what he thought he already lost. You don’t understand it, but he does. He’s never stabbed a monster in the head until its dark, old blood splattered on his shoes.

True, he’s shot the damn things. He’s stared, aghast at the pulpy horror of it all but he’s never frozen up. He’s been saving. Women and children first, and you’ve made the ground filthy with an enemy. You, who he loved and fell out of love with. He kisses you again, just above the ear.

Maybe no love was lost at all. It’s discomforting, the thought that he might’ve given up while you’d gone on feeling. But you’re in his arms again, alive and well after doing murder because he was frozen in place.

You feel him tighten again. The hug’s dragging on, but it’s cold in the woods at evening. And he’s in possession of a still-warm body. He feels heavy and hollow at the same time. So prone to sadness. You can’t imagine the toll of being a man who has to take it like a man. Shane couldn’t fake his calm without moments of emotional reprieve.

The two of you stand like trees, entangled with what used to be a person at your ankles. And Shane considers that you feel the same relief. That maybe your emotions are not diminutive versions of his bigger ones. That, perhaps, you were scared of losing him and of being lost. As he was. Still is.

You asked over a quiet dinner if he would share his feelings. He was irritable and snapped that if you had his feelings, you wouldn’t want to talk about them either. He curls around you and considers they might’ve been the same all along.

And every annoying, cruel thought he’s put to words wasn’t enough to convince you he should die. He dragged you out here with a hastily-packed suitcase and a pleading look in his eye. You know he thought the same about you, or else he might’ve left you behind.

The only ones behind, right now are Lori and Carl. You remember them through the haze of intimate connection, and you shift in Shane’s strong grip.

“Babe,” you hum, you’ve grown reattached to the way it tastes in your mouth. And he to the sound of it. Shane hums and lifts his head. “The others, we should—”

“Right,” he says, not pulling away enough to make him sound sincere.

You ever done it in the dirt, he thinks when he sees your pretty face. It’s not like seeing it for the first time, you don’t look any different. But you look just like you always have, good enough to lay down.

Sure, he pictures you saying back, slept over at your place a couple times. Don’t you remember?

He did love you for your wit. Now there’s something else that exists in tandem alongside it. The way you look at him, like you’re worried about something other than tomorrow. Or if you’ll die. In general it’s a very rare expression.

“You all there?” you ask instead, a little smile gently tugs at the corner of your lip.

He knows how he got you, not so sure how he kept you in the long stretch of no date night. In the dark hours with quick, pointless sex. But he’s so glad you stayed. You take hold of his big hands, pulling them off your waist and holding your fingers between his. It’s clear. Crystal clear. You don’t want him to let you go, either.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m here. I just—” he gives an exhale. The last of his fear, he likes to think. You nod because you understand.

“My hero,” you sigh. And he scoffs. He looks at the ground and gets distracted by the body parts.

“Please,” he says, “you saved my ass this time.”

“Makes us even, don’t it?” you reply. He hesitates to look up, your little smile has only grown. Trying to find the humour in this deep a dark is taxing but you make it look easy.

“I’d say so,” he replies, if only to play along.

It was bad in the little town where people smile too much. And single men don’t fit in. The dead crawl through the streets, still, Shane imagines. Not enough bullets to kill them all. And though he was pressed for time and his phone was dying, he called you. He said five minutes. Suitcase. Please, baby, we gotta run.

You sat in the front seat of the car with him and held his hand like how you hold it now. A strong grip in a sea of weak looks and painful disconnection from reality. Your hands have always been a grounding force. Because no matter how hard Shane has tried —though it isn’t very hard— his will not hold themselves.

All his strength is not useless to others, but it is most useless to himself.

He sees you try to make up for it while you gently guide him away from the still corpse pressed against rotting leaves. The little details of a relationship failed to impress him with such certainty that now the familiar comfort of his palm to yours shocks him. Something small in the wake of the gratitude he feels shouldn’t swallow him how this does.

Shane is half-petrified, he feels woken up. New world, new man. One who likes sentiment, apparently, and doesn’t need to be the tough one every second of the day. A lesser idiot would loathe they who try to help. All he’s ever been able to do is love the ones who care. Provided he remembers they care.

The fact you do presses against the front side of his undamaged brain. You throw in his face that you care, you press it to his lips. As the trees thin, you still hold on to him. As the tenuous return to the overcrowded highway nears, you don’t let go.

“Nothin’, Lor,” you tell the woman who’s not Mrs. Grimes any more and she looks sullen with hunger. Her boy, too. You don’t mention the dead man or how it almost killed you. How you stopped it from killing Shane because he got scared.

Let him be scared, you think. He’s brave, not stupid. And you’d do it again, you’d shove him with your whole body until he was safe.

You release custody of his hand this close to the cars. He flexes his fingers but can’t shake the feeling of you.

It’s not until night that you really see him again. He has a habit of retreating in on himself, everyone does it to cope. Because they dropped bombs on a city last night to stop the hoard of shuffling feet. And you thought for sure you were another corpse to him with the way he held Lori Grimes.

But he leans against the family car with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He stares out at the black mass where the lights used to be. Tomorrow, you decided as a group, you’ll go somewhere safer. In the open like this isn’t the right place to be. An old man with an RV knows about a quarry where a group could lie low.

Tonight is a still, tepid, ugly thing. There’s hope, but it’ll be reserved for dawn. It’s just gone dark, now and Shane has his knife back in his belt. You remembered to hand it over.

“Thinkin’ somethin’ big?” you ask, to him but also to the night. Even when he’s serious, his eyes hold a softness. It makes you reach out and brush your hand over his shoulder so that he’ll look at you.

“You’re the one with the big thoughts,” he gives a non-answer because there is no sexy way to express bleak malaise. You understand, “might be the only college girl for miles.”

“That’s generous,” you smile at him though what he’s said isn’t funny. He tried, it’s the thought that counts.”But you think, Shane, I know you do. Wanna talk?”

He shifts, as uncomfortable as when you’d ask him that before lying down to sleep. It wasn’t quite marital bliss, he’s not sure he could’ve allowed that. You tilt your head to the side and look at him now like you don’t want to be his wife. It’s what he’s been waiting for.

“Thank you,” he finally says, “for out in the woods. And for not kickin’ up a fuss ‘cause of what happened last night.”

You know he doesn’t mean the bombs. He means the woman he held in his arms. Because she was crying, sobbing and needed somewhere safe to melt. Who doesn’t, every now and again. Shane’s mostly muscle, he can hold a lady up with a hand if he has one to spare. Last night, he did.

“You did the right thing,” you tell him, instinctively you lean in his direction, “she’s lost a lot.”

He huffs in agreement and now your hand is on his arm, sliding down until your fingers wrap loosely around his wrist. It isn’t a possessive gesture.

“And so have you,” you say, “that’s all I wanted to talk about, scout’s honour.”

Shane rolls his shoulders and tries desperately to look anywhere but your eyes. It doesn’t work. They hold more emotion that he worries he could contain. Next to you, he feels as deep as a puddle. All laid bare and understood, he was never taught that it could be a good thing.

“None of us know what the hell’s goin’ on, that’s the truth,” he says. He moves to take your hand as you did his in the woods. It feels more correct for its repetition.

“I know,” you say, “but I love you.”

He goes quiet, only electing to pull you closer by the hand. To tuck you against his chest like he did when you made a dead thing lie still. Your cheek rests on his shoulder. And the lovely sensation of being a pillar is shared by the both of you. He is not something against which you can crumble and break. Shane offers support and you’re stronger for it. As he is with you.

“Yeah,” he manages, “me, too,” and there’s another pause you may not recover from, “I love you, too.”

And the two of you slip into comfortable silence, content to hold each other. The both of you wonder separately how you could’ve been so wrong to assume words like that were once true but not so any more. Out of a desire not to do greater harm, you do not voice your questions.

Instead, you watch the Atlanta void grow. The smoke from the bombs is as ugly as the explosions, blotting out the stars. But they’re there, you imagine. Just hidden. And under them, you kiss Shane. Because you can, because you’ve killed for him and he has for you.

Hero worship can be mutual.


End file.
